Even an irrelevant distractor stimulus is integrated into event files. Subsequently repeating the distractor triggers retrieval of the event file; however, an unresolved issue concerns the question of "what" is retrieved by the distractor. While recent studies predominantly assume that the distractor retrieves the previous response, it…

The interconnectedness of bilingual memory remains a topic of great debate. Semantic priming provides a powerful methodological tool with which to investigate this issue in early bilingual toddlers. Semantic priming effects were investigated in 21 bilingual toddlers (2.5 years) within and across each of their languages. Results revealed the first…

Portrayals of fathers in the mass media influence parents' views of the importance of fathers to the well-being of children and of fathers' competence as parents. Awareness of how these portrayals influence parents is crucial to the effectiveness of professionals as they seek to improve child well-being through their work with parents,…

A number of previous studies showed that comprehenders make use of lexically based constraints such as subcategorization frequency in processing structurally ambiguous sentences. One piece of such evidence is lexically specific syntactic priming in comprehension; following the costly processing of a temporarily ambiguous sentence, comprehenders…

In three priming experiments, we investigated whether the meanings of ambiguous morphemes were activated during word recognition. Using a meaning generation task, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the dominant meaning of individually presented ambiguous morphemes was reported more often than did other less frequent meanings. Also, participants tended…

Behavioral syntactic priming effects during sentence comprehension are typically observed only if both the syntactic structure and lexical head are repeated. In contrast, during production syntactic priming occurs with structure repetition alone, but the effect is boosted by repetition of the lexical head. We used fMRI to investigate the neuronal…

Category-based reasoning is central to mature cognition; however, the developmental course of this ability remains contested. One strong indicator of category-based reasoning is the propensity to make inferences based on semantically similar labels. Recent evidence indicates that in preschool-age children the effects of semantically similar labels…

A primary function of prosody in many languages is to convey information structure--the "packaging" of a sentence's content into categories such as "focus", "given" and "topic". In English and other West Germanic languages it is widely assumed that focus is signaled prosodically by the location of a…

What are the processes underlying word recognition in the toddler lexicon? Work with adults suggests that, by 5-years of age, hearing a word leads to cascaded activation of other phonologically, semantically and phono-semantically related words (Huang & Snedeker, 2010; Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989). Given substantial differences in…

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is the valence change of a (typically neutral) stimulus (CS) that is due to the previous pairing with another (typically valent) stimulus (US). It has been repeatedly shown that EC effects are stronger or existent only if participants know which US was paired with which CS. Knowledge of the CS-US pairings is usually…

The purpose of this study was to compare the speed of phonological encoding between adults who stutter (AWS) and adults who do not stutter (ANS). Fifteen male AWS and 15 age- and gender-matched ANS participated in the study. Speech onset latency was obtained for both groups and stuttering frequency was calculated for AWS during three phonological…

The "automatic letter-sound integration hypothesis" (Blomert, [Blomert, L., 2011]) proposes that dyslexia results from a failure to fully integrate letters and speech sounds into automated audio-visual objects. We tested this hypothesis in a sample of English-speaking children with dyslexic difficulties (N = 13) and samples of…

This study focused on an instructional component often neglected when teaching the pronunciation of English as either a second, foreign, or international language--namely, the suprasegmental feature of lexical stress. Extending previous research on collaborative priming tasks and task repetition, the study investigated the impact of task and…

Form preparation in word production, the benefit of exploiting a useful common sound (such as the first phoneme) of iteratively spoken small groups of words, is notoriously fastidious, exhibiting a seemingly categorical, all-or-none character and a corresponding susceptibility to "killers" of preparation. In particular, the presence of a…

Processing fluency has been shown to have wide-ranging effects on disparate evaluative judgments, including judgments of liking and familiarity. One account of such effects is the hedonic marking hypothesis (Winkielman, Schwarz, Fazendeiro, & Reber, 2003), which posits that fluency is directly linked to affective preferences via a positive…